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Sunday, 12 February 2012

Boro And Ireland Fans Left In The Cold By Deep Freeze

Yesterday was not a good day to be a die-hard Boro fan from the island of Ireland.

Regardless of what was happening, or what may have happened, in yesterday's games, it is impossible not to sympathise with those who paid good money to support their teams on Saturday.

We had heard earlier in the week that icy conditions in both Suffolk and Paris respectively had placed the weekend's big football and rugby matches in jeopardy. (Although to this day, I'm still wondering, as Niall Kelly of The Score put it, how a stadium that is less than twenty years old has no under soil heating.*) To go ahead with one game and to virtually proceed with the other was naivete of the highest order on the part of match officials.

This was another one of those times when the right call was made - but at the wrong time. The real winners here were the transportation companies and sports governing bodies, who stand to make an extra profit from this situation no matter what. The Donegal Democrat's Alan Foley summed it up perfectly on Twitter yesterday: "Michael O'Leary 1, Ireland Fans 0". Meanwhile, Emma Robinson has just found out that Boro fans who had tickets to the cancelled Ipswich games will get half price tickets for the rearranged fixture - but there is no news of any kind of refund. How's that fair? Ah well, more money for the recipients, I guess.

There are those of you who will believe that abandoning yesterday's Boro match was a blessing in disguise, considering our post-Sunderland hangover. But was Ipswich's victory really as "inevitable" as Anthony Vickers has suggested? You can argue that they should have been hammering us, but the bottom line is, they weren't. And had we survived the first half, there's every chance that someone like Andy Halliday could have come on and helped us turn the game - in the exact same manner as last season's Portman Road fixture.

Anyway, it's in the past now. Onto Forest on Tuesday, and here's to ending a hoodoo against a team we haven't beaten at home for nearly forty years...

Si's Insights will return soon with a blog post about several Boro players who could claim to be "screwed over".

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* Kelly told me later that he has since learned that the Stade De France was built on an old gasworks site. Hence under soil heating would have been more than a little dangerous. C'est la vie...